Changing the way we do social media

There is a tension I am constantly trying to manage. How do we encourage and inspire you in a world that is so saturated already with encouragement and inspiration? I’ve been wrestling with this for a while.

And here’s why. Our mission is to create practical tools and content that equip women to cut through the noise of everyday life and find fullness of life in the presence of the Lord.

I’ve felt this tension that maybe I’m just adding more noise. But I truly want to equip you, so how do we do that as a company?

What I’ve come to realize is that if you spend even 2 minutes being inspired by something, and it stays just a cute little thought, it’s a waste of your precious time. And those God-filled quotes that feel good actually become just one more distraction from us having a personal relationship with the Lord. We have to take action. Not necessarily every single time we open our phones but thoughts about God we read should push us to Him in a real way.

This is my heart. It’s been my heart for a while. When I thought about it, I realized, this is exactly why I wrote The Finishing School. To start living out what we learn. The whole visual of the finishing school is that those girls didn’t just learn skills and stay in the dorms for life. They got out there and used everything they learned for their own life. Every bit of knowledge they soaked up was for a purpose. To practice it and use it.

It all fit together so perfectly. But applying that logic to social media felt impossible. But I’ve been praying and the Lord recently brought incredible clarity. So here’s how we are going to try to equip you while simultaneously trying to connect you with the Lord.

1. Share content on a consistent timeframe.

If I post to Instagram that day, it will consistently be at 6:30 AM Central, Monday – Friday. If I miss that window, I’ll save it for another day. (If you aren’t seeing our post, the ones that show up in your feed are those you engage with so like or comment and you’ll see our stuff when it’s posted!)

If I share Insta-stories, you have 24 hours to watch it. You don’t have to be on your phone all day long to see what pops up.

FB Live videos will be Thursdays at 10:30. I’ll announce the topics ahead of time and actually create an event so you know topic and schedule ahead of time. It won’t be every week, but if I share an FB Live video, it will happen then.

I promise you, I won’t be perfect at this. There will likely be some exceptions but I really want to give this my best! Why is this a goal? So that you know checking multiple times a day won’t mean new content from me. So that you can soak up what you read without already moving on to the next thing. It’s easy to feel like something amazing is waiting on the other side of clicking that Instagram icon on your phone. I want to help release you from that. What if you knew hopping on, you’d see the same thing you saw two hours ago? Freedom. And really, it feels incredibly vain to even suggest that this will revolutionize your Instagram use. I know you follow hundreds if not thousands of other people but this is what I can do. I can’t control everything, but I can control my own actions. I want to add value to your life and contribute to your well-being and the well-being that I hope for myself too.

It honestly feels incredibly vain to even suggest that this will revolutionize your Instagram use. I know you follow hundreds if not thousands of other people but this is what I can do. I can’t control everything, but I can control my own actions and if my mission is to help you find Jesus even in a world of distractions, I want to make sure I’m not just adding more distractions but actually equipping you with content that points you to Jesus.

2. We will not have giveaways that reward the “first responders”.

Our giveaways will last a minimum of 3 days instead of encouraging you to constantly be on your phone. This might sound silly but I think these things affect us way more than we think. And on that note, we are about to start a monthly giveaway that you will not want to miss! But like I said, you don’t need to be glued to your phone to catch it! 😉

3. I may not respond to your direct message.

This is to protect you and me. I have felt so much pressure to respond to messages quickly. Seeing that little “new message” blue circle makes me tense. And unfortunately, the rush to respond (and usually having a kid underfoot) means I never give my best responses to Instagram DM’s. I always open the app on the go and hate for you to see that I’ve “seen” the message and just don’t care to respond when really I just need to wait till a better time. But to avoid any question of that, I normally spitball a response on the go. Instead, email us!! I have two girls who help me in my inbox now so I’m able to respond quicker. Just having a full keyboard makes me so much more likely to send a well thought-out and typed out response. And for you, this frees you from checking social media for responses.

4. Posts will strive to have some sort of action step that requires you to step away from the screen and reflect.

This is my favorite. I will be asking more questions and sharing more prompts as part of the content to get you thinking and not just mindlessly scrolling through oodles and oodles of inspiring words. As I have thought about all this, my heart is that anything I post will inspire you to not keep taking in new content, but will encourage you to process what you just read…even if it’s something from someone else. As I created the Fresh Outlook journal, I have realized just how little we process our lives and what a detriment it is to our wellbeing and our minds. We cannot expect to grow if we don’t process what we learn.

Honestly, this has already started happening the last two months. When I am writing those things, it’s the content I feel is going to be the best for you. I feel like God speaks to me so much on what to share. I’m not sure why it’s different because I feel His prompting all the time but for some reason, I’m most excited to share that content with you. So the best content will be sent to you so you can read on your own schedule. There will be no fear of missing out if you don’t check it and no need to add us to your notifications to make sure you catch everything. You can literally read months later if you want. You can sign up here for our monthly pep talk.

I’ve already said it, but I’m not so prideful to think I’m the end-all-be-all on your social media. But I want everything we do to flow from our mission and after so much wrestling, I feel lots of clarity that this aligns with it. 🙂

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the input of information you take in? Have any techniques on how you process information?

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When you said, “I know you follow hundreds if not thousands of other people,” I thought “Yikes! I can barely keep up with the 156 people I currently follow (on IG). I cannot imagine following thousands!” I recently unfollowed quite a few people in my feed because it was becoming noise. Nothing was sinking in. Marshall Segal, in “Not Yet Married” (the book I mentioned to you in a DM on IG), says “Our smartphones are instruments of mass distraction… We work hard to be in the know but end up knowing everything about nothing” (p. 51-52).
I resonate so much with what you said in this post, and I could already feel some ideas clicking in my own head – like checking IG stories at a specific time during the day, AFTER I’ve already accomplished the more important priorities (like time in the Word).
Thanks for sharing!

Ah yes!! I love that! And I agree! I usually have to unfollow when I hit 120 or so because I can’t keep up and I tend to be a scroll to the last post I read person. I’m thinking if people are following several hundred or a 1000, they don’t see everything!

HI! I’M VAL!

I’m a Deep South gal, who lives off dark chocolate, lime lacroix, books and Psalm 16:11. I love chatting about prayer, motherhood, entrepreneurship, books and margin and my absolute favorite? When I get share how it all blends together! 🙂